In this fast-paced episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve dig into a wild week in AI and tech. Cam shares how he stunned futurist Peter Ellyard by using ChatGPT to generate a bold, original idea called “The Other Year” – a radical, identity-swapping sabbatical for all Australian adults. Steve loves it, but the discussion spins off into a brutal critique of political cowardice, economic inequality, AI translation workflows, and the geopolitics of the AI arms race. From Neuralink trials to Honda’s reusable rockets, from AI-generated music to legal rulings on copyright, this one covers everything. Is AI stealing jobs or creating new ones? Are we on the edge of a superintelligent revolution—or just in a corporate lemming race off a cliff?

Audio of FUT 43

 [00:00:00 ]

Cameron: Sure. My other, yeah. Uh, welcome back to the Futuristic episode 43. According to my notes, Steve Samino my, um, AI transcription engine in Descrip. Never, never likes having to work with your name after all these months and years of doing it. It’s likes So what? Summer Chi Chico, what Never gets it Right.

Doesn’t get my name right either. So don’t feel bad.

Steve: Look bias. Ai, ai, Italian racism is what we are hearing here. And I just wanna point that out,

Cameron: Systemic.

Steve: it’s systemic.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve: the mob got us and now the technocratic mob, they’re after us Again,

Cameron: What’s the Italian version of anti-Semitic? Is it anti [00:01:00 ] tic and.

Steve: I don’t like logs. It’s,

Cameron: Any wog. I called you a wog on the last episode.

Steve: for it. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t like your type around here.

Cameron: Well, it’s been a crazy week, Steve, um, in AI and tech and all of that. It’s just so crazy. But I wanted to start with something if, if you don’t mind. I mentioned last time that my friend Peter Ard, 88 years old, um, futurist, um, has was, was in Brisbane with his partner Robin. Had a lovely time with him, but had a lot of con conversations about I, uh, with ai, uh, shit, let me start again.

I had a lot of conversations with Peter about AI and just realized that he wasn’t really getting it still. So I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last week in an email thread with him, um, encouraging him to think about it in terms of creativity and, um, and I. [00:02:00 ] I’m sort of acting as the intermediary between him and AI now.

Um, and I asked him to give me a challenge to give to one of the AI tools to demonstrate that they are creative. ’cause his are, his question to me when we caught up is, do you think they’ll ever have imagination? And I said, they do right now. They’re creative right now. So he came up with this, uh, question that he wanted me to see what it could create, um, that was genuinely creative, built around some of his work.

He has these things, he calls the six pillars of livability, and he wanted it to come up with, uh, an idea for how we could make Australia a better place by 2050 built around his six pillars of livability. [00:03:00 ] So I’m gonna walk you through this ’cause I, I think it was pretty cool and he was sort of blown away by this.

My prompt and I used Chatt PT oh three deep reasoning model. The prompt was this, you are now a futurist whose job is to design a better future for humanity. Come up with one idea that is completely original and is not based on extending existing trends or technologies that would make Australia a more livable country in 2050.

And fits in with the six pillars of livability, prosperity, harmony, inclusion, sustainability, health and security. Now, to be fair, it came up with a couple of things that I rejected early on. I was like, nah, that’s not really that original, that’s just an extension of other things. You’re just, you know, taking existing stuff and, and, and, you know, making it more extreme or [00:04:00 ] more advanced or whatever.

So I pushed back and a, a couple of times, twice maybe. Then it came up with this the other year act a once in a lifetime state funded identity exchange sabbatical. Core proposal. Every Australian adult is guaranteed and required to take one 12 month other year, somewhere between their 25th and 55th birthday.

During that year, they live, work, and vote in a host community whose demographics are as different from their own as an algorithm can manage urban versus remote, wealthy versus disadvantaged, migrant hub versus old settler town, et cetera. Think of it as compulsory whole life, cultural cross training. No uniforms, no bootcamps, no charity optics.

Just swapping places long enough that the word them loses, meaning. Why it’s [00:05:00 ] new? National service exists. Military civic Peace Corps style gap years and couch surf exchanges exist, but there is no country on earth where a universal mid-career identity swap sabbatical is a legal right and obligation. It isn’t an extension of technology or an NGO trend.

It’s a structural reboot of social experience built straight into citizenship. And it goes on and on and on. Has a timeline for delivery, how it would work legislatively, how it would be funded. Basically, a federal agency and trust fund, 0.6% of GDP offset by winding back duplicate employment subsidy schemes, a pairing engine.

Independent algorithm balances 20 plus variables. Income, quintile language, background remoteness, climate industry, disability status. No one has sensed somewhere they medically can’t live cost and cover award wage paid from the trust. If the host employer [00:06:00 ] can’t home mortgage slash rent frozen by law for the year child option, families can move together or split with travel stipends, civic rights, temporary enrollment in local council and state electorates, you vote where you live that year.

Return and certification completion internationally recognized cross-cultural competence license, a hiring premium in both public and private sectors. The bottom line is, instead of betting on gadgets or tax tweaks the other year, puts human beings into each other’s shoes, literally for a whole year. And lets empathy do the heavy lifting across prosperity, harmony, inclusion, sustainability, health and security.

One bold never tried lever. Six pillars lifted together.

Steve: Look, I cannot tell you how much I love that. That’s one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard, and I have heard similar things. It, it does come back to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, like it. And [00:07:00 ] it makes sure there’s a couple of stones in those shoes and they don’t fit properly. Or if you’ve had stones and shoes with holes in the bottom, you get yourself a nice pair of, uh, a dope pair of Nikes, as Zach Di Larocca said in one of his great songs.

And ramble too. He had a dog pair of snake son.

Cameron: Look, I was impressed and Peter, Peter was impressed and, and you know, here’s so two points about it. One is, well, obviously apart from the fact that I think it’s a great idea. One is the prompt was very specific, what it had to focus on and two. It came up with this idea in a minute. I mean, after I pushed back a couple of times on the first couple it came up with, like by minute three it came up with this idea that you, Peter, and I all thought was a great idea.

Imagine if you i’d, I’d got it to come up with a hundred ideas over the course of the next hour and a half, right?

Steve: And it points out something [00:08:00 ] important is that we have all the technology we need right now. to solve all of the world’s problems and human frailty has always been the issue, always will be the issue. And it reminds me of Hara, who I’ve got in my little thing to talk about.

Noval Hari, who wrote Nexus and Sapiens, he said that it’s strange that we think that an AI will solve all of our problems. when the AI is based on us. He says, we, we don’t need AI to solve our problems. We need humans to do it. Now here’s the point.